Reflection-+Essay

Topic
toc ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS: What does it mean to respond to text? and How can we relate a personal experience through writing **?**
 * Essays **

Common Core Standards

 * SL.9-10.1.** Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9–10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
 * SL.9-10.2.** Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source.
 * SL.9-10.3.** Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, identifying any fallacious reasoning or exaggerated or distorted evidence.
 * SL.9-10.5.** Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest.
 * RL.9-10.7.** Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment.

Suggested Student Objectives

 * Identify and explain the characteristics of various types of essays
 * Identify and analyze the effect of rhetorical strategies
 * Apply rhetorical strategies to essay writing projects of their own


 * Terminology**
 * abstract/universal essay
 * compare-and-contrast essay
 * objective/factual essay
 * personal/biographical essay
 * satire
 * classification and division essay

Suggested Additional Readings

 * "Lincoln and the Gettysburg Awakening" Glenn LaFantasie (excerpts)
 * "The Lost Childhood" Graham Greene (narrtive essay)
 * //Notes of a Native Son // James Baldwin (autobiographical essay)
 * "Thanksgiving: A Personal History" Jennifer New (reflective)
 * "Where Worlds Collide" Pico Iyer
 * "One Word of Truth Outweighs the World," Alexander Solzhenitsyn
 * Excerpt from "On Seeing England for the First Time" Jamaica Kincaid
 * "Shooting an Elephant" George Orwell (reflective essay)
 * "Stranger In A Village" James Baldwin (reflective essay)
 * Excerpt from "Comments on The Arrival" (Shaun Tan)
 * "How the Media Twist the News" (Sheila Gribben Liaugminas) and "Media Bias Comes from Viewers Like You" (Tyler Cohen)

Resource Links
Introducing the essay Essay writing ideas, topics and publishing tips Ideas for classification/division essays How to read essays you must analyze How to analyze an essay Analyzing essays

Activities
Your assignment is to create and present a photo essay revealing your perspective (position) about an issue or topic of importance to you. Your assignment is to choose one critical perspective and compose an argumentative essay in response to a prompt taken from the texts you have read.

Assessments
Using one of the essay types studied in this unit, write a reflective essay that illustrates an event in which you or someone you know felt like a “stranger in the village” or was perceived as “strange” by some group, include a photo essay as a visual representation of your reflection.